Australia's Robin Hood 'attended his own funeral'

Frederick Ward, a man known as Australia's own Robin Hood, may have evaded police and emigrated to Canada, rather than being shot dead by law enforcers in 1870, as the history books say.

A new book written by one of Ward's descendants claims that the man buried in his grave is not Ward, but his uncle Harry, the Indpendent reports. Ward himself escaped to the Californian goldfields and then settled in Canada, where he lived a quiet life before dying in 1903, his family ebelieve.

Ward - also known as Captain Thunderbolt - was nicknamed the "gentleman bushranger" because he never used violence and was always polite to his victims.

Barry Sinclair, whose great-great-grandmother was the bushranger's mother, claims in his book, Thunderbolt: Scourge of the Ranges, that police quickly realised they had killed the wrong man but concealed their mistake – a cover-up that has continued for 140 years.